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Use Website SEO to Market Your Novels Without Social Media

This is the third in a series of blog posts about marketing for fiction authors without using social media.

SEO for websites:

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is all about helping people find your website or blog when they search online, like when someone Googles “Christian Regency romance” and your book pops up. By using the right keywords, writing helpful blog posts, and organizing your site well, you make it easier for search engines (like Google) to know what your site is about and show it to the right readers. It’s like leaving breadcrumbs for new fans to discover you.

I will be the first person to say I am terrible at SEO, but I’ve been learning thanks to long conversations with ChatGPT and Grok.

I’ve been trying to craft better blog titles and I just learned about putting meta descriptions for each blog post (When did that option appear? I hadn’t even noticed!). By using keywords, I’m hoping to get more traffic to my blog.

I’ve also been listening to several free webinars by nonfiction coaches about websites and they tell you to identify who your reader is, what they want, what they need to get what they want, and how you can give it to them. And if you craft this in a story or a creative way, it hooks the reader. Oh, and you have to try to do all this in the 5 seconds a person will be on your website, or else you’ll lose them. (No pressure!)

While the advice is for nonfiction, whose reader usually has a pain point, I thought I could sort of apply it to fiction.

For my website, I figured the best way to hook a reader is with my tagline. For my Camille Elliot pen name, my tagline is Pride and Prejudice meets Mission: Impossible. Below that is “USA Today Bestselling Author Camille Elliot, Christian Regency Romantic Suspense Novels.”

Both taglines are catchy and give a clue as to my genre. Its purpose is to hook the reader, to get them to think, “Now that sounds like something I want to read.” Then, the line under my name gives a more thorough description of my genre.

I used AI to help me figure out the right header tags to use for my text and how to use keywords to best effect on my homepage.

(And in case you were wondering, my tagline is H1 tag, “USA Today Bestselling Author” is H4, Camy Tang is H2, and the longer description is H3. “Camy’s Latest Christian Romance” is H2, and ”Camy’s Next Christian Romance – Coming Soon” is H3.)

The AI suggested some keywords specifically for my author brand which didn’t have too many searches per month, but also didn’t have a lot of competition.

One webinar I listened to suggested the website Ubersuggest for keyword research, but I haven’t tried it yet.

Doing all this optimization for my website was a pain and took a lot of time. But I’m not posting on social media and trying to draw readers to me that way. So getting this done will help draw people to my website instead.

SEO for blogging:

I have a LOT to say about blogging, so I’ll put that in a separate post.

SEO and Ads for Selling direct:

Lately, a lot of fiction authors (romance mostly, but also lots of other niche genres) have been setting up website stores. They optimize their SEO for Google searches and they advertise using keywords and tested images.

Ebook bundles are super popular for people to buy from a Facebook or Google ad, and some authors make six and seven figures a MONTH from advertising and direct sales. It’s usually most profitable for authors with a long backlist, but even just a 5 or 6-ebook bundle can do well with a good Facebook ad.

The difficulty is a good Facebook ad—authors test tons of headlines, 1-sentence hooks, images, and ad text to find the best combination for an effective ad, but once made, it usually lasts months without needing further tweaking.

I haven’t done many Facebook ads because I don’t have the desire to learn to do it, so I hire an ads manager for advertising my website sales like a special book bundle. I haven’t done Facebook ads consistently, so I don’t really know much about using it for driving traffic to a website store.

I’ve also really recently partnered with Alana Terry to have her do the heavy lifting in terms of marketing for my ebook bundle while the books are out of Kindle Unlimited. All I have to do is send her the books, covers, and descriptions, and she’ll email her large newsletter and craft the ads for the bundle. In that sense, it might be more like collaboration, but she’s utilizing SEO to target the ads.

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